A Sneak Peek at the Writing Desk in StoryTime

Creation is messy. Although the end result can be clean, simple, beautiful or tasty (depending on what you’re creating), the process of putting it all together often gets out of control. Problems crop up. Maybe the design glossed over important details, so you make things up. Maybe your improvisation goes badly. Maybe the materials are fussy and unyielding. Maybe you are still learning.

It’s okay. No one is an expert the first time.

Still, people like things that are done. Neat and tidy, no loose ends. Completely working. Perfect. Some of those people claim that they “don’t want to know how the sausage is made.”

You’re not that kind of person, are you? You are curious. You want to see how things work. You can handle a hot mess because it’s fun to see where things are going and how they get there. And you like to know that other people create things that are flawed, too.

Great. In that case, try my game StoryTime. It’s a work in progress to be sure. In fact, I’m going share my staging environment loaded with the latest code that’s “working” but is by no means ready for release.

Is that crazy? Yes, it is.

Will it be crazy fun? I doubt it. But you still might want to check it out. You need to hurry.

This post is going to age quickly. Today is Friday, March 16, 2018. By next Friday (March 23rd), the next release of StoryTime (1.4) will be online, and you will have missed your chance to see some sausage in the making.

StoryTime 1.3 (current) and 1.4 (WIP) use the same database. So if you become an author in the 1.4 WIP, you will retain that privilege when the release is completed. Whatever you create in 1.4 WIP will still be there when I release the finished software. Any mess you make will be there for you to play with later.

No need to be shy. Nothing can be published at this point, so whatever you do will remain private. (Full disclosure: I’ll see it, but no one else will.)

You can create draft story-games. You can change the story information to your heart’s content. You can add scenes and write as much as you like.

BUT, and this is THE BIG BUT, you cannot create or modify the signpost. What’s a signpost? Play The Mission. There’s a signpost at the end of each scene. It shows the list of actions you can take. Still not sure what I mean? Get in there and try it out.

Come on. Try it. It’s fun.

Just one note to save you some frustration. When you log in, the navigation system doesn’t realize it needs to refresh itself. So just hit the refresh button in your browser. Then you’ll see a link to Account. Once you agree to the terms of being an author, you might need to sign out and back in, then hit refresh, and then you should see the Writing Desk link in the header.